Texas cancer agency leader comes under fire

Updated 11:28 am, Thursday, December 6, 2012

AUSTIN - The board chairman of the state's embattled cancer initiative sharply criticized its executive director Wednesday, describing as embarrassing recent revelations that an $11 million grant had been awarded without proper review.

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Mansour's comments followed reports last week that the agency in 2010 awarded an $11 million commercialization grant to a start-up biotech company in Dallas, Peloton Therapeutics, even though the company's proposal was never reviewed by any peer review committee.

Peloton sought the funds to discover and develop new cancer drugs. Its grant was one of the first four commercial grants awarded by the agency.

The disclosure came after a tumultuous summer for the cancer initiative. The agency rescinded a $20 million grant to a team led by the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center because of questions about the integrity of its review process. Agency officials subsequently portrayed the incident as the only time it hadn't followed its procedures.

Performance review

During Wednesday's oversight committee meeting, member Tom Luce called for a performance review of Gimson at the committee's January meeting. Luce, stressing accountability, wanted to do the review immediately but was told by agency lawyers that because no notice had been given, the January meeting was the earliest it could be conducted.

Gimson took full responsibility and apologized for the agency's failure to review the Peloton grant. But he emphasized the institute was in its infancy at the time, "started from scratch and just building its staff, writing rules, creating peer review companies."

He said the agency didn't want its still-developing processes to cause it to turn away companies that had promising ideas.

"It's not fair to have individuals come in three years later and not fully understand what we were doing then," said Gimson. "It has to be judged in the moment."

Agency exec resigns

The problems with Peloton were discovered in October during an internal audit. They were attributed to the agency's chief commercialization officer at the time, Jerry Cobbs, who Gimson said mistakenly included the grant in a list of awards presented to the oversight committee.

Cobbs resigned after the problem was discovered but before it hit the news. He has not commented publicly about the matter.

Gimson said he relies on his top prevention, scientific and commercialization officers to give him applications recommended by peer review committees. The staff now provides the oversight committee with information about each grant up for its approval, complete with its peer review scores and comments, but that was not the practice in 2010.

At Wednesday's meeting and in a letter to state Sen. Jane Nelson and state Rep. James Keffer, the authors of the legislation that created the cancer agency, Gimson provided details of the grant's route to approval. Nelson and Keffer last week wrote Mansour and Gimson demanding an explanation.

Gimson wrote that Cobbs thought he was submitting a request to perform "due diligence" on a new company, when in fact the submission was for committee approval of funding. He wrote that Cobbs never corrected the mistake, and the lack of a commercialization peer review did not come to light until the audit.

Concern persists

At Wednesday's meeting, Mansour asked for assurances that no one at the cancer agency had any financial interest in the Peloton grant. Gimson said that to the best of his knowledge, no such conflicts existed.

After giving Peloton $3.2 million of the grant, the cancer agency suspended payments and Peloton is resubmitting its grant proposal. Mansour told Gimson that when the proposal comes back before the board, he'll have a difficult time approving it unless he has absolute knowledge no one affiliated with the agency has ties to the company.